A Little Kiva Time in San Francisco

I should change the title of this post to “INTENSE Kiva Time in San Francisco”! It’s the Kiva Training week – a week packed (to say the least) with learning, talking, excitement, meeting people, social activities, and did I mention learning?!

Every Kiva Fellows Program class goes through an intense week of training at Kiva’s HQ office in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District. Kiva Fellows travel far and wide to come to this training week. Our agenda is packed with training sessions and social activities. We start every day at 8:30 a.m. and go till about 5:30 p.m. and sometimes later.

There are 20 or so people in the class this time around. We’re the 15th Kiva Fellows Class, hence the KF15 I have been mentioning a lot. Everyone is so interesting and extremely excited. People have traveled from as far as Australia, the UK and Germany to be a Kiva Fellow. And people’s backgrounds differ tremendously from graduate students to finance professionals to fresh grads…we’ve got it all.

Some of the KF15'ers on the last day of training

The week is almost over and I feel so connected to people I met less than a week ago. Maybe it’s the fact that we will all be going through something similar in less than a month. Or maybe it’s the fact that we believe in something…be it micro-finance as a means to achieve economic and sustainable growth in the world, or Kiva itself, or travel, or maybe it’s all of the above. But there’s definitely a connection that is being built with the fellows and the Kiva staff. I think saying goodbye to everyone will not be easy.

 

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